Monthly Archives: July 2012

This is a guest post from Rod Pitcher, a PhD student in Education at The Centre for Higher Education, Learning and Teaching at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. The focus of his study is the metaphors that doctoral students use when describing their research and other matters related to their studies. In this post he shares a particularly useful metaphor with us.

I’ve occassionally written about parenting through a PhD and some of the perils of PhD parenting. Since the average age of those studying for a PhD is 37 most of you will have some kind of family commitment, and yes – pets count. I find it mystifying that so many of the ‘how to get a PhD’ books offer precious little advice on how to cope.

This post was written by my fellow blogger Dr Geof Hill a.k.a The Research Supervisor’s friend. This post was written to help supervisors give better feedback, but I asked Geof if I could publish it here. Complaints about quality of feedback from supervisors are common. If your supervisor could do with some pointers, perhaps you could print this out and accidentally on purpose leave it lying in their office…

This post is by Dr Alex Hope, a Lecturer in Sustainable Development and Project Management at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom and was originally post on his blog. Alex is also on Twitter where he tweets about sustainability, academia, PhD advice and life. I hope you will head on over there and check out what he has to say!

If work is invisible, Star argues, it can come to be de-valued. This concept of articulation work is powerful because, by naming it, we recognise all kinds of work which might otherwise remain invisible – or not be seen as a legitimate use of time.

The Thesis Whisperer is edited by Dr Inger Mewburn, director of research training at The Australian National University. The Thesis Whisperer has contributors from around the world. Read our about page if you are interested in writing for us.